Blog

Where we discuss our work, thoughts, and process

Introducing Statgy: A short-term social media share tracking tool

At New Media Campaigns, we are huge fans of analytics so we can make sure we make the best decisions for our clients, and, well, just because data is fascinating. While there are many terrific analytics tools available for most statistics you would want to for a site, one area that we’ve often found to be lacking was tracking the increase of social media shares for a URL at short intervals after the initial launch.

As an example, let's look at a theoretical political campaign microsite launch. The first 24 hours after it goes public could look something similar to:

11pm - A release is sent out to a press list and other campaign contacts

7am - The first tweets mentioning the site start to go out by a campaign account, supporters, reporters, and other observers

10am - News stories and blog posts about the site start popping up around the web

3pm - An email is sent to campaign lists, and supporters continue to share the link across their social media networks

6pm - A post is made on the campaign Facebook page encouraging supporters to share the site

Evening - The site continues to be shared across Facebook and Twitter

Now what’s the best way to track the url as it picks up momentum and is shared across Facebook and Twitter? Tools like Google Analytics do a great job tracking social media referrals, but another statistic worth tracking is the number of people who have shared the link on social media, plotted against time.

To better track the social momentum of webpages (and to scratch our own itch), we created Statgy. We’ve used the project internally for the better part of this year and have found value in it, so we are excited to open it up now in the hope you may too. Anyone is welcome to use it, so swing by and create some pages to track social media shares.

Additionally, to facilitate sharing, Statgy pages are public to anyone with the URL, so feel free to go crazy sharing your pages with clients, friends, followers, and others.

If you have any suggestions for changes that you think would make Statgy more useful, please feel free to tweet them at us.